As the editor of this modest publication, I am tasked with reading everything and that’s OK because I like to read and happen to think we have some of the best writers around. So there I was before the last issue was published reading Bill Campbell’s column. Usually I take everything Bill says with a grain of salt, as would any thinking woman, but I digress.

As he waxed enthusiastic about some group called the Four Freshmen, about whom I knew diddley, I was just reading. Then I came to the part when he said that Julian Bond was a fan and that Julian Bond would be at Harbor Docks on March 6 to hear this group sing. It seems that Charles Morgan and Bill arranged this concert for Mr. Bond because he is such a strong and long time fan.

I stopped reading. I called Charles. I was prepared to grovel if he would just introduce me. At this point, I didn’t care about the Four Freshmen, but Julian Bond was someone I had long admired and I just wanted to meet him.

“Sure baby, I’ll introduce you. We’ll have dinner,” Charles said. For feminist readers I want to note that Charles calls everybody—male and female‘baby’— so no offense given or taken.

And so it was that I not only met Julian Bond, but we dined together, along with his wife and daughter. It was interesting this occurred on the 40th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march when people in the United States finally awoke to the notion that some things were pretty rotten for most of our dark skinned fellow citizens, especially in the south. It’s hard to explain how some people come to be larger than life in your imagination, but Mr. Bond has long been one of those people to me. Perhaps it was his youth, his obvious intelligence or his outrageous handsomeness, but he made an impression on me 40 years ago with his dedication to righting injustice and his willingness to give everything he had to a cause. As one might expect, age has not diminished his good looks, his bearing, or his intelligence.

It turns out he’s just folks. We learned a bit about each other over dinner, with him telling stories on his kids. We didn’t talk politics or about the state of the world. These days he’s Professor Bond teaching civil rights history at the University of Virginia, a college founded by Thomas Jefferson—Jefferson being a man a bit conflicted on the issue of race himself.

After dinner we all trooped out to the deck for the concert, where I was promptly blown away by the sheer musicianship of the Four Freshman. Four handsome young men who could all sing and play multiple instruments. I was instantly attracted to the trumpet player until I realized that with our age difference, adoption would be more appropriate than seduction. Damn, I hate when that happens!

It kills me that I’m now forced to take Bill Campbell more seriously. Then I learned that Julian Bond belongs to a fan club devoted to the group. It would appear that I’m just enough years younger than these two music lovers to have missed this group entirely, but the performance made a convert out of me. I just love it when I can understand all the words. As Mr. Bond noted in his introduction of the group, it once was standard that popular music also be good music, a fact that may be lost on the hip-hoppers.

It’s a weird and wacky world my friends. Now I’m anxious to find who else Charles Morgan knows that I want to meet. I’m prepared to clean out his horse stables if need be, but he’d probably just say, “No problem, baby. Just come on around about six.”

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